>> Why if so does he describe them in such detailed fashion?
> This question does not follow from anything
Presumably he's dog whistling about Foucault's sexual preferences.
> This question does not follow from anything
Presumably he's dog whistling about Foucault's sexual preferences.
As for his flatly contradicting himself, opening his own book a practically random page brings up the following quote from a contemporary (Damhoudere) complaining that Foucault's executioners exercise "every cruelty with regard to the evil-doing patients, treating them, buffeting and killing them as if they had a beast in their hands." The fact that executions were public spectacles did not mean that people approached them with expectations of justice.
He writes to elicit that emotion to readers many decades (or centuries, depending on the specific practice) removed from those practices. Doesn't mean the people back then had the same emotions or those were the ones that brought the reform.
Reading about the treatment of slaves in the South today will get a huge emotional response too, but that was not how slavery was abolished then -- it took a whole civil war (and decades of struggles with prejudice, Jim Crow laws, KKK and segregation).
>As for his flatly contradicting himself, opening his own book a practically random page brings up the following quote from a contemporary (Damhoudere) complaining that Foucault's executioners exercise "every cruelty with regard to the evil-doing patients, treating them, buffeting and killing them as if they had a beast in their hands." The fact that executions were public spectacles did not mean that people approached them with expectations of justice.
Where's the contradiction? What some public figures and intellectuals said of the executions is not the same as what the public sentiment about them.
To continue with the same exampke, that's in the same way that there were several prominents pro-abolitionists in the South, but that was not the prevalent sentiment of the people there.